


You Are an Emergency

by thingsbaker



Series: Dissolution [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 20:03:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingsbaker/pseuds/thingsbaker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She makes you the sociopath you've always wanted to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are an Emergency

**Author's Note:**

> The title came from a comment on another fic of mine, made on Livejournal by user crinklysolution. This was written during/just after Season 1 and has no real spoilers for Season 2.

 

There is a girl. A beautiful girl. You know she is beautiful because you’ve asked, and John has told you, and also because it is your business to notice things like this. Lauren Willis is beautiful: she has skin the color of coffee with real cream and hair the unnatural but lovely red shade of a fall sunset reflected in thick, aerosol clouds. She wears tight dresses and shoes that show off her strong, runner’s calves. She has slightly larger than average breasts that she displays to best advantage whenever possible, wide-set, almost violet eyes, and a quick, sincere way of smiling that instantly puts people at ease, even when she’s lying. She is mad about chemistry and old movies and small dogs, and none of this is in any way surprising.

The first surprise is that she likes you. You are cold and aloof not on purpose, not as an act, but because this is who you are and this is what you do and this is how you have always behaved. John puts up with this because he loves you, because you are brilliant and he wants that; Lauren simply acts like she doesn’t notice. It’s not a flaw she puts up with or a challenge she must face to be around you. When you are too quick, too sharp, too brilliant for the many pathetic minds around you, she doesn’t flinch or apologize or startle. She smiles.

The second surprise is that you like her. It’s not precisely her brilliance, and it’s certainly not her body, that first convinces you you’re attracted to Lauren. No, it’s something else; it’s her certainty that you should be attracted to her. Hardly anyone treats you this way, as a functioning, physiologically and sexually normal man – not once they know you at all. John is an exception, though he went through the usual paces of doubt before he was convinced (very, very thoroughly) of your capacity for sexual desire. Lauren, however, needs no warm-up. She asks you point-blank within a week of your first meeting whether you are interested in her: “Do you fancy a shag sometime?” she asks.

You are standing over a container filled with acid and a man’s left foot and what remains of his sneaker. Two minutes ago, you nearly blew the entire thing up, and there are small particles of the right foot still clinging to the ceiling. This is not the kind of place where people generally proposition you; in fact, people rarely proposition you. You wish they would, because at least when something’s being directly offered, you know what’s happening. The subtler arts of flirtation are lost on you.

This question is blessedly direct, but it offers its own challenges. “You’ve met John,” you say, “and you’re certainly smart enough to have understood our relationship is more than professional.”

“Sure,” she says, shrugging. “Have to admit, though, it’s never occurred to me that a man like you was particularly conventional in his relationships.”

“Ah,” you say. “No. True. But John is quite conventional in these matters.”

“Quite?” she says, and raises an eyebrow. She laughs. “Well, that’s too bad for you, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” you agree. “I do appreciate the offer.”

“It’s not rescinded,” she says. “Just so you know.”

You nod and turn back to the leg. The mixture is bubbling pleasantly; it’s nearly time to weigh the sample again. You think you’ll enjoy telling John about this this evening; he’ll be glad to have missed the experiment, of course, but as a medical man he really should appreciate the meaning of it.

You think about telling him of Lauren’s offer, and you decide against it. Every outcome you can see is negative. He would only be in the way, today, if he were present, sighing and wondering aloud what you were doing inside on such a nice day and asking himself,  _out loud_ , why he can’t have a normal boyfriend who likes the cinema. He would be even more of a distraction if he were lurking in the corner, acting jealous, like you are some kind of possession.

You shudder at the thought and turn back to your work.

You don’t tell John about Lauren’s offer that night, or the next, or the next. Instead, you decide it is something you need not mention. It’s not as though you’ve never been attracted to someone else before; it’s not as though  _John_  hasn’t been. At least once a week, you see the small spark of arousal in his features, usually as his eyes follow a particularly nice female form across a room or the street or the scene. It doesn’t really bother you, just as Lauren’s attraction to you – and yours to her – shouldn’t bother John. It will, of course, for reasons you’re not entirely clear about, so you don’t mention it.

That seems to be an even better decision when John breaks his foot; you are certain that if he knew of this attraction, he would never suggest that Lauren become your new assistant. And this is how surprise number three comes up: It takes her fifteen minutes at the first crime scene you visit together to figure out how the man has been murdered.

It takes you ten. It would have taken John at least ninety.

You call Lestrade and while you wait, you watch Lauren smoke a cigarette while sitting on the curb. She is far younger than you are; twenty six or twenty seven, nearly a decade your junior, and she’s never been to an actual crime scene before, yet here she is, smoking, chatting like it’s nothing.

“You’ve seen a dead body before.”

She looks at you like you’re entirely stupid. It is fantastically attractive. “I work in the morgue, Sherlock.”

“I meant you’ve seen a fresh body before.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “Worked as a med tech on an ambulance crew for a while.”

“In Germany?”

She shakes her head and doesn’t offer more. It is a tantalizing mystery and very possibly a lie. You know her school background but nothing of her youth, nothing of how she landed her graduate work in Germany or decided to come back here. You study her hands – steady, ringless, nails clipped short but still painted burgundy – and her posture – straight, favoring no particular side – and you still have no idea. “You weren’t military,” you say, but god, it’s a guess.

She grins and keeps smoking. “You’re a riot to wind up,” she says.

Lestrade arrives three minutes later. You have gone back inside to stare at the body, and to get away from the smell of her cigarette and, god, her.

That night you want to tell John what’s happened. It’s novel, that you’re so physically turned on by someone who isn’t, well, John. You would like to puzzle through this with him, preferably in bed, because you could really use a good shag. But John has had a difficult day; his foot hurts more than he’ll say and he is anxious that it will lead to more time off. He is sharp with you and you are sharp right back, and he goes to bed alone and then so do you. You stay up trying to research Lauren Willis and you come to few conclusions except that the last time you stayed up all night, thinking of someone else who wasn’t a victim or a suspected murderer, it was John.

The next morning, you sit at the kitchen table and wonder if you shouldn’t just shag her and get it over with. She’s lovely, she’s physically quite strong, she seems very unlikely to develop an emotional attachment that would be troubling or distracting in any way, and you want her. This would have been reason enough, five years ago, but then you met John.

The man himself comes downstairs at that moment, and he rubs his hand across your back as he crosses to the kettle. You have been sitting here in your pajamas since five a.m., staring at the wall; three nights ago you ran an experiment with all of the spoons and the microwave and a large, borrowed magnet that has left them all completely unusable; you have no idea where John keeps things like sugar and cereal, nor have you purchased either in the entire five years since he first moved in; and yet there is not a single surface you can see on which you and John have not had sex in the last year.

He is murmuring to himself at the kettle. It sounds like you will have Earl Grey today, and perhaps toast with jam. You are flooded with affection for this man, this man who has stayed and stayed and stayed, this man who is daring and strong and very much in love with you. You stand and put your arms around him, and he says, “Oh, it’s a morning like that, is it?” and he lets you help him back to bed.

You remind yourself, later, when you wake to the smell of brewing tea and lingering sex, that you don’t need Lauren for this. You have John. You will always have John.

Yet the temptation doesn’t pass. Lauren continues to assist you, and you continue to enjoy it. John continues to be unable to rejoin you, and you feel there’s something both lost and gained in this. Lost, certainly, because the fun you used to have with him is now given over to Lauren; gained because you want him in an entirely different way, now. You want him at home and you want Lauren on the streets, and you are satisfied in both.

Then John is healed, and you realize things are about to go back to how they were, and you do not want that. You are not ready for it. What surprises you is that John, also, is not ready for it; he demurs when you mention that you have a new case.

“You don’t have to,” you say, and you read the conflict in his face. It almost surprises you that he decides, so quickly, not to join you. You know he’s conscious of the physical attraction Lauren feels for you; he has asked you, directly, whether there is anything to be jealous of. You gave him an honest no, because what you feel for her should not logically interfere with what you feel for him. If anything, this at-hand temptation, the near-constant state of arousal you’ve found yourself in since Lauren began joining your investigations, has made you more sexually and romantically active with John than anything since that first blissful year of constant want and attention.

But his decision is his, and it doesn’t ultimately surprise you. The entire episode of his injury has made obvious a new, different side of John. After the first small flush of concern you felt when he fell and didn’t get up, you have mostly been annoyed by his injury and his unwillingness to keep up. It is, you’re certain, unwillingness; there is a vaguely Mycroftian strain of intransigence, of  _laziness_ , in John that you’ve only recently noticed. Perhaps this is because you now have someone to compare him to: Lauren. She runs with you the way John first did, as though she is hungry to know what will come next. She laughs without abandon when you mock Anderson at a crime scene; she tells off Lestrade herself the next time for being late and behind the curve.

In some ways, it’s less like having an assistant and more like having a second self on the scene. It is brilliant.

And you want more. You always want more.

And so there is a night, a warm night, when you sit together in a decrepit flat, waiting for an old and reliable source of yours to bring a bit of evidence by. Lauren is wearing entirely appropriate clothing: a thin tank top, shorts, and running shoes. She sits next to you with her legs stretched out and they are nearly as long as yours. She smokes.

“How precisely do you do that here?” you ask. “I was accosted nearly every day when I smoked.”

“It’s hard for men to tell a pretty girl to stop,” she says, and offers her cigarette.

You take a drag, then two, then decide to keep the smoke for yourself. She lights another, not perturbed. “Won’t your man smell that on you?”

“Of course,” you say, though you’re really not sure. Likely, John went to bed hours ago.

“Will he care?”

You shrug again. “Possibly,” you admit.

She shakes her head. “I don’t know how you do it,” she says. “I had a man, once. Just about drove me insane. The rules, the constant consideration – it’s a lot. Heavy.”

“There are benefits,” you say.

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” she murmurs. You stub out the end of the cigarette and watch her smoke. She is casual about it, very much a professional.

Your source comes and you listen to his story. It makes no sense, but Lauren asks him a single question and then it does. Everything does. You are alight with pleasure; the mystery is solved and you have done it and everything is so wonderful, so beautiful.

Lauren is so beautiful.

She drives you back to her place, from where you can check one final detail on her computer and call Lestrade. She hands you a glass of wine and her mobile phone. While you talk to Lestrade, she slips behind you on the couch and unzips your trousers. You do not pause at all in your argument, but you also do not push her away. She stays there, her long, bare legs on either side of you, her hand resting on your rapidly hardening cock, the whole time you are on the phone.

“Best to John,” Lestrade says as he signs off, and you say nothing and close the phone.

Lauren rests her mouth at the nape of your neck. You’ve worn a long-sleeved shirt; you are sweating. Her breasts press against your back in a not perfectly comfortable way. “I should call John,” you say.

“Mm.” She moves her hand the smallest fraction of an inch, and god. God. Obvious, you think. It’s a post-case high; you always want sex now. Sex, or drugs, or greasy Chinese, or a cigarette. You can smell two of these things on her. You should go home, you should climb into John’s bed, you should –

“Why do you still have separate beds?” she asks. You’re not sure if you said that aloud or if she’s simply deduced it. She’s that good. Oh. Oh. She’s so good.

 

After that, there is simply no question. You have started down this road and you must now see it through. You feel a new tenderness for John, on these days after you’ve been with Lauren. You want to protect him, and that is a new, dangerous feeling for you. The more you are with her, the more you are aware that you are doing something terrible. It is not unlike the time you spent on heroin. You are aware, and yet you cannot help yourself.

You explain this to her, standing in her small kitchen, one evening. You have been fucking her for six weeks. It must stop. John still has no idea and you never want him to know. You turn to pour yourself a bit more wine, and when you turn back you are surprised to see her sitting on the counter in front of you. She puts her hands on your shoulders and draws you in, and then her legs around your waist, and she is so surprisingly strong. She is full of surprises. You  _love_  to be surprised.

You take her to bed or she takes you. The semantics don’t matter. She is extremely precise in her movements. She tells you clearly what she likes, what she doesn’t, what she will and will not do. The latter is a very short list. She does not object, for instance, when you take her to a movie theater and slide your hand under her skirt and your fingers inside of her. She does not object to you going down on her while she talks on the phone to her best friend from Germany about the weather and football and her new job. She does not object when you want to revisit a crime scene, when you ask her to take off her clothes in the moonlight and let you press her to a wall that once had blood on it. These are things you would never – could never – ask John for. They are things you’ve never dreamt of doing, and it takes you nearly three months to realize it’s because you don’t care about her. You don’t mind using her to find out how things feel, how they might be done, because you really don’t have any strong feelings for her beyond a base, physical want.

At one point, when you are at home with John, you realize that it has become nearly impossible to be with him anymore, because you want so badly for him to be safe. You have never been safe.

“Moriarty is still out there,” you say to him. You've just solved a new case. You are sitting on the couch, cold Chinese on the floor before you, and John has been flipping through a week-old copy of the Sunday  _Guardian_  for an hour. Your skin is practically itching with the need for action, for celebration. For Lauren. “He was behind this latest.”

John looks up. “I thought you said that was a suicide.”

“Yes.”

“How can Moriarty be behind a suicide, exactly?” You stare at him. “It’s not like the cabbie again, is it?”

“He is out there,” you insist.

“I sometimes wish you’d leave well enough alone,” John says. “Not everything is a conspiracy, you know. Sometimes things just – happen. Sometimes there are just crimes. Not everything is part of a master plan.”

“This is,” you say. He isn’t even trying to understand. You stand. “I’m going out.”

John looks up at you, and you are certain you’ve been found out when he says, “For cigarettes?” You start to answer, but he cuts you off. “Get the patches instead, would you? It’ll be easier for me to clean you up from an overdose of those than from lung cancer.”

You exhale slowly and agree. On the street you have texted Lauren within a minute, and you are at her flat in less than ten. You have never forgotten Moriarty’s threat, five years ago. John is the threat. He is your biggest vulnerability. Lauren is nothing next to this, and perhaps for that reason, you can’t stop seeing her. It is simply too easy; she makes you the sociopath you have always wanted to be.

You know that she is not a woman you will be with for long. You are certain that she sees other men and at least one other woman. You feel nothing about this. Yet, one night not long after, when she suggests that perhaps you shouldn’t worry so much, that  _everyone_  does this, that probably even John has had his share of affairs, you become blindly angry at her for even the suggestion. She clearly does not know John as you do.

You are rough with her that night. She is rough right back. It is no wonder, then, that it is only a few days later that John does find out, in perhaps the worst way possible.

When you come to in the hospital – after John has drugged you and run away, after you have been hit by a bicycle, after you have been found out – your first thought is of Lauren. Of the last time you were together, that afternoon. You had found her in her small office at the hospital and lifted her on to the desk, pushed her underwear aside, and slid into her and watched her eyes not even flicker.

“Tell me,” you said. “Tell me about the crime you saw. The body.”

“My father,” she said, but you knew she was lying. You knew because she shuddered and blinked, and her right hand scrabbled for her cigarettes even though you were there, you were inside of her, right then.

“You’re incapable of feeling,” you’d said against her neck.

“You didn’t lock the door,” she’d returned, and looked you in the eye as you came, thinking of John, thinking it must all end soon, thinking how much you don’t want to feel this way, how much you don’t want to  _feel_  at all.

When they let you out of your cubicle at the hospital that night, you go directly to her office again. She is standing by the window, which she has cracked open, and she doesn’t flinch when you walk in.

“Good Christ, again?” she says.

“Tell me how you knew that Mr. Farmer was killed by his sister,” you say. You are thinking back to the summer, the night at the awful house, the question she had asked. You are thinking of how easy it would be to manipulate a man by giving him exactly what he wants. You are thinking of what you should have all along.

She shrugs. “A little birdie told me,” she says. She crosses to you, lays one hand on your shoulder, and presses the heel of it into the bruise she left. “Just like one’s told John, I guess.”

You nod. It is so clear. It is so obvious. No one really has ever seen you and wanted you like this, with no judgment, with no conditions, and being wanted like that is the only thing that would ever have broken you from John. Now you’ve done it anyway, just for the illusion.

You step into the hall and you feel everything. Everything. Every beeping hospital machine, every nurse with a rapid step, every flickering call light, every family member’s sigh, it is all a part of you, because you are an emergency. You are on fire with the urgency of ending this all, everything, now. You send a single text message to a long-erased but never forgotten number, and you wait for everything to begin.

That night, you sit smoking on the couch at Baker Street. John’s things are gone. John is gone. Mrs. Hudson was in tears when you came in; you sent her to her sister’s for the weekend, trying to imply there would be a domestic or two she wouldn’t want to see. Really, though, you know there will be no fights. You know he is gone and there is nothing you can do.

It does not surprise you when Jim Moriarty walks in the door just after midnight. He is in a suit. He has a cane and shined shoes. You are still bandaged from the hospital, with blood on your sleeves. “He even took his gun, did he?” Moriarty says. “How sad, Sherlock. One might think he no longer cares.”

“One might,” you say. “I did enjoy your present, though.”

“Mm, yes. Not my area,” he says, and leers, “really, but she is quite good. I was so pleased that you two hit it off.”

“If you’ve come to gloat, please do continue. I shall relish this entire conversation later, when you’re rotting in prison.”

“Oh, I think we both know, I’ll never go to prison.” He taps the leg of John’s chair with his cane. “You must really back off now, Sherlock. I’ve warned you. I’ve shown you. I think you know it’s best. You must. You must.”

“Must I?”

He turns and his smile is for a moment blinding in its hatred. “My dear, you must, you really, really must.” He flicks open the curtains. “Tell big brother hello, won’t you?”

“Wait five minutes and tell him yourself.”

He laughs. It’s a hideous noise. Your shoulders ache from sitting so still, from wanting so badly to stand and hit him, throttle him, hurt him. “That meeting shall have to wait,” he says. “One Holmes is enough for tonight, I think.”

“Pity, I think you’d really get along.”

He stops at the doorway. “Think about what I’ve said, Sherlock. Really think, this time. Let’s stop this before someone who  _really_  matters gets hurt.”

It’s your turn to smile. “Too late.”

He nods. “I’ll be seeing you, then.”

“No, you won’t,” you say, and Moriarty pauses just briefly in the doorway, then shakes his head and moves on.

You think of calling Lestrade, after he’s left. You think of calling Mycroft, though you’re certain he will know – if he doesn’t already – of the entire thing. You decide against the latter out of exhaustion, and the former because you never want John to know. If you tell Lestrade, if you tell anyone, that Moriarty was here, that he’s been behind this entire thing – then John will know that your failure is doubled. You cheated on him not just because you are a man, and you are fallible and easily addicted and tempted, but because you were manipulated by your worst enemy in the most obvious way. You have been too blind for too long, and you cannot let John see you this way.

You never will.

You stay up that night, and the next, and the next. You have a plan. You will burn Moriarty ten times for this, and if you must burn yourself in the process, so be it. Moriarty should know better than anyone what it means to unmoor a man from all rational limits, from all that he loves and would protect.

Without John, there is nothing to stop him getting your full, undivided attention.


End file.
